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Crowdsourcing: A Definition

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing

Read the original article about crowdsourcing, published in the June, 2006 issue of Wired Magazine.

October 09, 2008

There's been a lot of controversy bubbling up among the Digg faithful lately. This is hardly unprecedented, but because social news is such a widespread and significant use of crowdsourcing*, these donnybrooks are more important than immediately meets the eye.

This one got its start a few weeks ago when Digg started purging its ranks, banning some 80 Diggers, purportedly for using scripts that violated Digg's Terms of Service. As it happened, many of the exiled were top Diggers, which is to say, part of the one percent responsible for driving 32 percent of all Digg's pageviews. Banning them raises two troubling issues at once: How can Digg represent itself as a democracy if such a small cabal of users determine such a large share of Digg's content? And two, given that this is the case, is it wise for Digg to alienate the same people that are buttering its bread?

And that, as they say, is just the tip of the iceberg. As I pointed out in my book, Digg and other social news sites are easily gamed. In fact, there are companies out there whose sole purpose is to do just that. Suffice to say that part of the reason for this week's radio silence at Crowdsourcing.com is my own research into recent events at Digg. I can't think of any more salient issue facing crowdsourcing right now than whether the crowd can act as a reliable filter, and there's no better place to start, er, digging into that issue than with today's required reading, an examination of the state of democracy at Digg from Mashable.

February 21, 2007

Ok, so this crowdsourcing thing is great. But, I don't want to spend my spare time beavering away at mind-numbing tasks for 10 cents-per-hour just to prove that humans are smarter than computers.

We already know AI software, or even the Semantic Web, still aren't at the stage to discriminate between finely tuned GO or NO-GO filters that require tight judgments based on a range of subtle multi-tiered contexts or human inferences. That's why we humans still have form and function in this increasingly automated "computer profile says NO" society.

But what if I just want to sit back and let the crowd inform me about current hot stories out in the blogosphere, rather than keep logging onto Digg to catch the latest stories.

Well, now courtesy of those kind people at Digg Labs, I can get my own hot stories in real-time, just like those corporate types or City Traders with their Reuters News ticker-tapes scrolling across their screen.

Digg Labs can show you three pages of incoming stories - in real-time on your screen!!!

1. Goto Digg "stack" these have clickable links to incoming stories in real-time.2. Digg "swarm" this is a dynamic pictogram to show popularity of Digg stories.3. Digg "bigspy" stacks incoming stories.

Granted, it only covers Digg based inputs for now.But it does demonstrate both the power and benefit of crowdsourcing initiatives like this. One thing's for sure. This software model will be copied by others and can only improve our real-time knowledge of what's hot on the internet.